LURKERS / DIE SISTER, DIE

The Charge

Go ahead and scream...

The Case

Scorpion's Katarina's Nightmare Theater offers up a pair of low-impact
chillers. One has turned up on a few of those Mill Creek supersets (you know,
like 32 movies on 8 discs, those sets); the other, well, I've never even heard
of it, and generally, I've at least heard of these things.

The over-exposed film is Lurkers, a bizarre stew from Roberta
Findlay. Findlay, with her husband Robert, made a bunch of exploitation films in
the 1960s and '70s. These were notable because, unlike most exploitation films
at the time, which were either about sex or violence, the Findlays' films were
about sex and violence. Among their "notable" achievements:
The Slaughter, a film so poorly made, even by exploitation standards,
that it sat on the distributor's shelf for years...until he dusted it off, shot
a new ending suggesting a "real" murder was being committed for the
cameras, and christened it Snuff, thus making exploitation history.

Michael Findlay died in the '70s in a helicopter accident, and Roberta
soldiered on through the '80s, abandoning exploitation for horror, and finally
abandoning filmmaking altogether.

Lurkers was one of Findlay's last films, and it's not exactly a
rousing send-off. A muddled story of an abused young girl who has terrifying
visions and nightmares who grows up to be an abused young woman who has
terrifying visions and nightmares, it's not without interest, but it's not worth
the trouble of really seeking out, either. Things like acting and production
values are poor, and it's a long, long way denouement-land.

The second film is easier to follow, but not particularly exciting. Die
Sister, Die is about a man whose sister controls the family fortune. She
wants to die. He wants her to die. Technically speaking, there should be no
movie, right? Oh, but there is, a long, talky movie that looks like an expanded
episode of a '70s television drama and is just as thrilling. The guy hires a
young woman with a past to care for his sometimes-nutty/sometimes-sane sister,
and what should really be a simple murder plot gets all bungled to hell and
back. I was hoping for a bit of the old Grand Guignol, but all I got was
a petit mal de tête. Not a lot to see here, but a passable time
waster.

Both films look and sound pretty good, particularly Die Sister, Die,
which comes with a pretty robust transfer, given the age and obscurity of the
title. The two films are contained on a single disc, and both feature isolated
score tracks as supplements, along with trailers for other Scorpion films and
some intro/outro stuff from Katarina Leigh Waters.

Two under-the-radar films get a reasonable but unspectacular under-the-radar
release.